Sartre's reputation has suffered in a fashionable backlash following his death. It seems that he was a "political illiterate", his biographies are "unreadable", his plays mere pièces à thèse, his novels either romans à clef or sterile dramatisations of obscure theories. In the latter criticism lies a strange misapprehension. To argue that a novel — any novel — is a sterile dramatisation of an already elaborated theory is to assume that the theoretical discourse has automatic primacy; it is also to assume that the ultimate source of authority for a text resides with its author. After structuralism and post-structuralism this is an odd position to defend.